However, screenwriters Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger don't flying kick and punch the plot into touch with similar urgency or invention.

Mothballed jokes about a panda's vast appetite or the creature's inability to scale flights of stairs are aired again and spiky banter between Jack Black's self-doubting hero and Dustin Hoffman's despairing red panda mentor also feel like hand-me-downs.

"If you only do what you can do, you will never do more than you can do now," cryptically sermonises the sensei.

Black's whirlwind vocal performance, which enlivened the first two chapters, is more of a stiff breeze here, but still whips up big laughs.

His gleefully frenetic verbal riffs are epitomized by one snappy exchange about the chief villain's propensity to engage in pointless "chitty chat chat" before a fight.

After 500 years of incarceration in the Spirit Realm, megalomaniacal yak Kai (voiced by JK Simmons) steals the chi of every kung fu master including his one-time friend, Oogway (Randall Duk Kim).

Only the Dragon Warrior - overweight dumpling-obsessed panda Po (Black) - can bring Kai's reign of terror to an end.

Meanwhile, Po is reunited with his rotund biological father, Li Shan (Bryan Cranston), and embarks on a quest of self-discovery to harness the power of chi.

In a mountaintop panda village, Po builds bridges between Li Shan and his surrogate father Mr Ping (James Hong), fends off amorous advances from ribbon dancer Mei Mei (Kate Hudson) and learns about his late mother.